The Last Great Road Bum

by Héctor Tobar

  * * *

  THE REFUGEES WATCHED from the grounds of a schoolhouse as Joe and a doctor approached in a white Land Rover with big red crosses painted on both sides and on the roof. Fifteen women and thirty-eight children lying on a cement floor, sitting against the walls. They were from many clans, all mixed together, wearing the printed patterns of their villages, their heads covered in scarves, cotton soaked with days of soil and sweat, because they had been too weak, and too busy moving, to wash. Years later, some will say not being able to wash was nearly as bad as the hunger. The refugees had come from three different towns, along red dirt roads, and they had seen this catastrophe unfold by a river and its sacred groves. Walking past oil bean trees in search of something to eat, past a shrine to the river goddess. In their hunger they had long, vivid dreams in which they spoke to their ancestors while their dying children laughed and played around them. Joe noticed a chalkboard with a lesson. Study makes me wise. Study makes me strong. Study makes me bold. Study makes me whole. He saw listless, numbed mothers, holding children. “How are we doing?” the doctor said. “Howdy. Yes, I told y’all I’d be back.” Joe checked one child, who seemed half asleep, and the boy’s eyes opened wider and the doctor came over and said, “You need a little medicine, little man, right now.” The doctor reached into a leather satchel and Joe helped him hold down the boy, who was maybe two or three years old; he wouldn’t open his mouth, until the doctor forced it open, and shoved in a pill, and the boy chewed and swallowed and managed to cry a bit. “That’s a good boy.”

  “Okay, Sanderson, let’s line up the rest of these kids. Inoculation time.” The pfft-clack delivering antibodies. The children on their feet. Pfft-clack. Pfft-clack. Later he would fill his journal with the details. The color of the mud on their feet, the names of the diseases: kwashiorkor, a kind of malnutrition. The wind rushed through the trees on the riverbank outside and he stood above a puffy-lipped boy whose belly was the size and shape of a volleyball. “It was so much worse six months ago,” the doctor said.

  Three hours later they left for another camp, this one a tent in an open field. Here the people were hungrier, thinner. “Dang, Joe. We’re truly needed here.” Children with spindled arms and hunger-bleached hair; don’t grab them too hard, you might break them. A few of the stronger women spoke of the absence of manioc and yams and described the deaths of friends and children. Just before sunset, a Red Cross truck arrived with sacks of food, and Joe began to cook porridge, and then ladled it out into tin dishes, and he watched the children and their mothers scoop it into their mouths.

  They traveled deeper into the war zone, within ten miles of the front. “How many people did we feed today? Sixteen hundred!” Dried codfish, delivered via helicopter, a salty sustenance with protein to build back muscle. Another village, and the chief insists on tasting the milk and porridge first, to see if it is acceptable for his people. He says proud men with titles are buried in the villages they left behind, yam kings, speakers of parables and proverbs. Such a loss.

  Finally, Joe arrived in the city of Uyo, where a Red Cross administrator gave him new orders: take a Land Rover and drive three officials of the U.S. Agency for International Development to Port Harcourt. Had just emerged from the woods when they told me I was needed as chauffeur. The Americans weren’t just the usual aid-worker minons, but rather mid- and upper-level diplomats and spooks, and their lodgings were at the best hotel still open in Port Harcourt. Joe joined them by the pool. After two weeks in the bush driving a Red Cross station wagon, now I’m ordering buckets of ice for Cutty Sark, Joe wrote home. But the hotel is costing me £4 per night, bullet holes in the lobby windows for free. This shit-show is over, the diplomats said, and Joe didn’t understand. They spoke in a kind of code about the alliances and the politics that had led to mass starvation, with the acquiescence of the U.S. and assorted European governments. After he left them, Joe took helicopter and plane rides deeper into the famine country, and night flights into the unconquered territories of free Biafra.

  Biafra’s last landing strip consisted of rows of light along a stretch of highway. Joe and a German colleague landed in the dark, and at dawn they entered a village where the people were eating frogs and minced rodents. They found a man selling two half teaspoons of lifesaving salt, and they arrived at a camp of two thousand people. Joe placed a hand on the clavicle of a girl of about six and saw how her bones were rising and her skin retreating. Her face was becoming a mask, the angles in her skull revealing themselves, and also the humeri and the metacarpals and the long phalanges of her hands. The inner armature of a child. He watched the weakest children sleep with quick puff-breaths, hearts speeding.2 Getting weird here, Joe wrote from Uyo two days later. Went to work Monday still scattered from the night before. Couple of hours later a little two-year-old kid died in my arms. Pneumonia. Bought his ticket right on the floor of the clinic. Before noon the German nurse and I were working over a second. Had to keep slapping the child on the chest to keep his heart clicking.

  The top Red Cross guy in Calabar found Joe one morning at the airfield and told him he wanted Joe to help organize evacuations of the sickest people in the areas closest to the fighting. He teamed Joe up with an American helicopter pilot, a quiet old guy from Sweet Home, Oregon, with sad eyes and a white mustache. We have to get to the isolated pockets where people are dying, Joe wrote home. Two more evacuations. Dismal business. While I was in the bush up near the front, a village chief in another area sent word to nearby refugees that I would bring the chopper down on a certain date to evacuate children. Gave them a false promise based merely on hope. Found out yesterday the refugees came and left. Four kids died. Got back last night to Calabar to hear that one of the children I brought in last week was also dead. But only a few haven’t made it. The rest are beginning to smile. So when they call out to me—“Doctor! Doctor!”—I don’t scowl anymore.

  When an American doctor asked Joe why he had come to Biafra, Joe answered that he was traveling around the world, gathering experiences to write a novel. “There is no novel here,” the doctor answered. “Imagine Hemingway here. What the fuck could he say?” In a tent in one of the camps in the bush, Joe witnessed a stillbirth, the sprawled-open legs of a woman in pain. “Acute peritonitis,” the nurse said. They pulled a purple-brown corpse from her body, putrefaction filling the air. The dead fetus fell from Joe’s hands into a bucket, and the woman stared at Joe and the bucket as he took her child’s corpse away, and the crazed look in her eyes would haunt him in the hours, days and weeks that followed. Outside, children were laughing as they played with scavenger dogs. The villagers introduced him to a boy with a disk of black hair on his head, and a dimpled smile, and said: “His father was killed, his mother died. He has no one.” Alone, without someone to make sure he was eating, he would die. Take him, please, doctor. On to the helicopter you go, little man, next to three others, now your brothers and sisters. We brought in some orphans. So we overloaded the chopper heavily the last run, Joe wrote home afterward. Low on fuel, red light flashing, pilot giving me his usual you-dirty-bastard glare but we made it all right.

  After his last helicopter run, Joe made a few more journeys into the bush by Land Rover, from Calabar and back. In the final village before crossing the river back to Calabar, he and the lone American doctor still working in Biafra were stopped by a family. Folks pleading from huts left in shambles, he wrote later. Newborn naked child thrashing about upon a bare wood table. Bleeding navel packed with cow dung. Dying from umbilical tetanus and pneumonia. Seven days old. No more anti-tetanus vaccines left. Ampules cost 11 cents apiece. Baby gasping, writhing, will not suck on his mother’s milkless breast.3 The baby had a seizure, and then his chest stopped moving, and Joe lifted him up, and breathed into his tiny mouth, and the boy’s breath and saliva tasted sour, and then Joe pushed on its chest, until the doctor told him to stop. It fell to Joe to write out a death certificate, on the back of some Red Cross forms used to chart malnutrition, and he hande
d it to the father, and Joe watched as the mother gazed at her child and closed his eyes, and ran her fingers over the sticky skin of his face and arms. She found a pair of scissors and removed the two buttons from the shirt he was wearing; she would bury the child in the shirt and save the buttons for her other children.

  The war wound down, and eventually it ended for Joe, and he was swallowed up by the well-fed metropolis of Lagos, where he wept and drank himself into a stupor for two nights. What is war? For me, dying children. And I wanted to create art from this. He looked at the notes he had scribbled and felt a sense of uselessness, and then he thought he might never leave Lagos; he’d die drunk in this hotel room with his memories of that last mother’s eyes looking into his. Finally, he took the envelope containing his Red Cross wages and bought a plane ticket home: Nigeria Airlines, from Lagos to Monrovia to Dakar to New York. And then another flight to Chicago, because he was done with bumming for a while, and finally the train to Champaign-Urbana, through the fields of robust and erect spring corn. He saw hamburger joints and supermarkets, and silos filled with corn and soybeans, and cows with udders bursting, and fat steers ready for slaughter. Champaign emerged from this fecund landscape, and Steve was waiting at the station this time, because Joe had called him from Chicago and said he was headed home.

  “Well, there he is! Travelin’ Joe, in the flesh.”

  They took the short drive to Mom’s house, and she was there in the doorway waiting as Steve pulled up.

  Virginia thought she must look older to him, especially after all her worry-watching the news and scanning the reports from Nigeria, and before that Vietnam. “Hi, Mom,” Joe said as he stepped toward her, and she realized that he was the one who looked older. Exhausted and perhaps sad. Then Joe did something he had never done after coming home from all his other trips—he hugged her for a good long time, his big frame over hers, and she wrapped her arms weakly around him, and patted him on the back. Same boy, healthy and whole and back home.

  “Sorry, Mom, it’s been a long trip.”

  “Well, come in and eat. Supper’s just about ready.”

  She went into the kitchen, and Steve and Calhoun looked at Joe as he sat before them, and they remembered his many letters, and Calhoun thought he must carry some deeper understanding of the world from having circled it. Steve dared to think that maybe this would be his little brother’s last bumming adventure, because Joe seemed to have wrung all the wandering from his thinner, sun-darkened body. Joe said that he’d been traveling for three days, and had had too much liquor on his various plane rides, and he sat at the table, before his mother’s roasted chicken, the whole bird there on a platter, steam rising from its brown skin, the sugary scent of cinnamon and baked apples beginning to drift in from the kitchen. “Tomorrow, I’ll make you some macaroni and cheese,” Virginia said. “Grab a leg, Joe,” Calhoun said. “Go ahead.” Drumstick. First bite, Mom looking at me. Abundance. A tiny glass tower filled with salt.

  14

  La Paz, Bolivia

  JOE RENTED A BACHELOR PAD in central Urbana and began to sort through his hundreds of pages of journal notes from Biafra. He started a novel. His unnamed protagonist in the The Children’s Song was himself, in the second person. Soon you were screening these fragile victims of starvation … He typed in the mornings, six days a week, as one group of three astronauts took off for the moon and planted Old Glory in the white Sea of Tranquillity; and after a second crew played hopscotch on the lunar surface, he sent off his manuscript to various New York publishing houses. By the time the third trip of moonwalkers was on the launchpad—Apollo 13—he began to hear back from them.

  * * *

  AMONG THE STACKS of unsolicited and unagented manuscripts in the old and paper-crammed offices of the publishing house on Union Square in New York, Joe Sanderson’s stood out; mostly for the subject matter, as outlined in the cover letter. Here was a Biafra novel, from an American who had worked with the Red Cross in that country. News of the war was still fresh in people’s memories and a Biafra novel had commercial possibilities. If the manuscript was half good, the reader might champion it and maybe make his name doing so. For the two days the reader spent with Joe’s book, he felt very far from the place he was (Manhattan, in late winter, a hint of spring in the occasional glint of sunshine on the upper stories of a skyscraper), and far from the places he had recently been (Yale, and its serene brownstone and brick). Fleeing Calabar around midnight, crossing the river on a bamboo barge … poling down a moonlit shimmering swath toward the far shore … returning to the empty schoolhouse with your nurse, companions collapsing beneath a shattered window pane … Obviously Joe Sanderson had been there, in Biafra. A mother saving the buttons from the shirt of her dead child. The ring of truth. Something you can’t make up … for they had other kids to attend to … other buttons to sew and snip … other children to someday bury. The reader put down Joe’s manuscript after reading those words and decided to step outside into the New York afternoon, and as he did so he saw buttons everywhere. Tiny white buttons clasped on Mr. Straus’s wrists as he came in through the door; red ones on the edge of Miss Miller’s wool skirt; and big buttons festooned with anchors on a man’s peacoat outside. The reader lived in a button-rich city, and the novel told the story of a button-poor country. I read books precisely for moments like these, thank you, Joseph Sanderson, to see Biafra in my mind’s eye while I take the elevator back up to the office, and again while I’m sitting at my borrowed desk, looking out the frosty window to understand the world as it truly is.

  Too bad most of the writing was so unpolished and unformed. A series of notes, really. Joe Sanderson filled page after page with sentence fragments and one ellipsis after another. Maybe six thousand ellipses in the entire book. This guy Sanderson wears out the period key on his Olivetti. I can see him at the typewriter repair shop: It’s not typing periods anymore! And there was the problem of Sanderson’s unnamed protagonist and narrator, who was prone to long speeches, such as the one that followed the death of a newborn baby … villagers trailing behind you on the riverbank, hungrily listening to your words … revolution … revolution … telling them to stop being victims … refuse the blame for their own misery … become defiant … get weapons … break their link in the chain of death … After that the reader skimmed up to the last of the three hundred sixteen pages, and he put the novel back in its box for the return trip to Urbana, Illinois. What was this Sanderson guy like? Maybe a white American man of about thirty-five, with vertical worry veins on his forehead. Troubled by all the suffering he’d seen in Africa, and also filled with a sense of his own inevitability as an author, unaware that his lecturing of the natives was off-putting, an echo of the White Man’s Burden. People could read African writers now, after all, there were many, more published in the U.S. every day, and the reader wondered if there might be an African novel in that pile next to the editor’s desk.

  * * *

  TWICE MORE JOE’S book-in-a-box bounced back to him. He went to work raising beams at a Champaign construction site and wondered what he would do next. He had circled the world, gone off and seen wars and the aftermath of wars in Korea, Vietnam, Yemen, Congo and Biafra, and he had watched children die in his arms—and none of it added up to a book anyone would publish. He turned twenty-eight, and left for Durango, Mexico, and tried his hand at gold prospecting, and lived in a cave, and he ended up in drinking parties with a Hollywood crew shooting a movie there.1

  * * *

  WHEN VIRGINIA GOT his letters from Mexico, she read them and told Calhoun her son sounded like he was in a rut, which was a strange thing to say about someone dedicated to “bumming” his way around the world. But he was better off in Mexico than in the United States. Her new job, on the campus of the University of Illinois, gave Virginia a hint of the deep unraveling of order unfolding across America. The students in Champaign-Urbana were ready to revolt over the killings of other students at Kent State, and over Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia. S
he went back to work, balancing accounts for the Department of Geology; the undergraduates in her orbit were invariably friendly and polite, even when they were heading off to the protests. “Just a march for peace, ma’am.” Someone bombed the campus ROTC office. Had to be outsiders. People from Chicago. The students declared “days of action,” and then a strike, and the classrooms were empty, though the staff came in to work, as always.

  She left her office one afternoon and came upon a line of buses near the quad, filled with police officers. Students were gathering nearby. She was carrying a set of memoranda and accounting reports on three sheets of paper, headed for the university administration building. Accounts payable, accounts receivable, qualifying cost, contribution revenue, exchange transactions. The essential bookkeeping that kept everything and everyone going: professors, adjuncts, janitors, toilet paper, the mimeograph machine. She looked at the pages and took her eyes off the path and she collided with a state police officer who was holding a round stick as long as a sword across his body.

  “Oh! Sorry.”

  “No worries, lady. But you dropped your papers.”

  A hefty breeze blew the sheets away. She chased after them and felt ridiculous, running in stiff wool, fifty-seven years old. One of the papers stood still and she stepped on it and grabbed it, and she took two more steps and caught the second one, but the third was swept away by another gust and jumped, froglike, off the surface of the grass. And then it skipped and slid between two young men in green uniforms who were wearing round helmets. Soldiers? Oh yes, she’d heard something about the National Guard. “Excuse me, dear,” she said, following the disobedient memorandum as it was blown deeper onto the lawn, past the bare legs and sandaled feet of students, and she looked up at these young people to see them glaring at the soldiers and police officers behind her. Beads of sweat on the forehead of that too-pale girl; and a sunburn on that young, thin soldier holding a rifle stiffly before his chest. She moved her eyes back down to the ground, and she saw her memo clinging to a concrete path. It jumped onto a patch of grass and joined a herd of other papers, and the herd began to circle, and rose in the air and spun faster, and finally she grabbed one of the flying sheets, hoping it was hers, but when she looked at it, she did not see accounting terms, or lists of figures, but instead a gray, stylized fist, superimposed with a series of words, running on.